Our Oakland

Monday, September 15, 2014

Oakland Urban Paths: Julia Morgan

Saturday was a different kind of Oakland Urban Paths walk. Instead of focusing on a single area, we focused on a single person, noted architect Julia Morgan. She's best known for designing Hearst Castle, but she designed over 700 buildings in California, including some noted examples here in Oakland. OUP co-founder Dan Schulman had his work cut out for him in planning the walk, as Morgan's works are spread all over Oakland. About 50 people and quite a few dogs joined us for a longer than normal walk.

We started at the corner of Harrison and Bay Place in Adams Point. Although the building that now houses Whole Foods wasn't designed by Julia Morgan, it has an interesting history, too. It was built as a powerhouse and car barn for the short-lived Consolidated Piedmont Cable Co.'s cable car line (yep, Oakland had cable cars for a time.) Next door the Piedmont Baths used the excess heat from the boilers to heat water for their pools. The building was later redesigned into a car dealership. Dan told us about Julia Morgan's education at Oakland High School, UC Berkeley, and the prestigious École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where Morgan became the first woman to receive a certificate in architecture.

Our route took us past a number of Julia Morgan-designed houses, including several with ties to Oakland history. The McElroy House belonged to city attorney John McElroy, who is remembered with a fountain in Lakeside Park. The Joe & Rose Shoong House belonged to National Dollar Store founder Joe Shoong. Shoong and his son were generous with their fortune, and donated to a variety of causes including support for several attractions at Children's Fairyland.

Some people elected to take a shorter route back to our start, while the rest of us headed towards Piedmont Avenue. There we saw a rare example of Julia Morgan's commercial building designs, the Fred C. Turner Shopping Center. From there it was a short walk to the King's Daughters Home. It was designed as a home for incurables, which in those days included people with the infirmities of old age or strokes, as well as those with diseases like tuberculosis that they had no cure for. Julia Morgan donated her work for the design, and after her brother Sam died, Morgan's mother Eliza Morgan donated money for the special front gateway on Broadway.

The official end of our walk was in front of Chapel of the Chimes which Morgan did some design work on, and Mountain View Cemetery, where Julia Morgan and the rest of her family are buried below a modest marker. But a few diehards wanted to see the Morgan grave, so we continued on into the cemetery. We passed by the Ayer and Hockenbeamer graves, which Morgan is said to have designed the markers for, and I pointed out some other notable graves along the way, as well as told people about the Mountain View Cemetery tours given by docents.

Thanks to Dan for leading the walk and doing the needed research, and thanks everyone and everywoof who came on the walk, whether you turned back early or went all the way to the Morgan grave. Next month's walk will be in Butters Canyon, led by local historian and author Dennis Evanosky. More details as they become available.

Some notable Julia Morgan designed buildings in Oakland that we didn't visit (or we'd probably still be walking) include: